GAME CHANGING ALERT

(ETA: This post was MEANT to be published last friday but blogger was not cooperating on the pictures)

and no, I'm not referring to the bizarrely ludicrous happening of Saturday where, casually deciding to participate in the Kalu'ak Fishing Derby for the second time ever and somehow ended up winning and getting the achievement that only 103 other people on the server will get this year. Though that was pretty cool, and had me fishing for the rest of the day since suddenly Salty seemed a lot more obtainable. No. What we are talking about here, is a potential solution to the great IOC debacle.

For those three of you not familiar with the fact that IOC sucks for alliance, let me first tell you that Alliance sucks at winning IOC. How much suck I would imagine depends slightly on your battlegroup but on mine at least it's a good 8-10% lower win rate than other BGs (which if you want to really make it sound bad, is a 16-20% swing). The reason for this, in my opinion and generally concurred in by other PvPers around the blogosphere, is a map design that allows for horde glaives from the docks to perch in a "sweet spot" across the bay from the west side gate and batter it down without opposition b/c our cannons can't reach them there.

However, while grinding through IOC with my arena partner (and yes, the new season is going very well, thanks for asking, 26-16, 921 so far), we noticed a shammy doing something interesting. By the time I could get back to get a good screenshot, he was gone, but I can give you the gist of it :



Upper circle is the sweet spot where horde parks their glaives. Lower circle? IN RANGE. If you park some ranged dps with you down there, it's like lying in wait. The horde will come right up to you, not realising you're there, and you burn those glaives like nobody's business. I've tried this both with my 2s partner Kitykat and with our new 3s partner Littlebroe (a destro lock) and it's worked lovely every time. Horde usually jumps down in a rage and kills us after, of course, but the damage is done.

And really, the more people that do that the better, I think -- the point is not even the physical "we can actually kill glaives now!" one, so much as the psychological "guess what horde...that's not such a sweet spot and we can KILL YOU THERE TOO"...maybe they'll eventually become leery enough of it that they'll start risking the cannons to come at the gate how it was meant to be.

Go forth and game-change!